Piping installations, industrial infrastructures, may be distributed all over the country like blood vessels in a human body, and be established as supply routes for various energy resources. However, such piping installations are mostly buried in the underground, and thus, when corrosion occurs in an inside wall of a pipe by the elapse of time and the inside wall is broken due to impacts of external environmental conditions; it may be difficult to inspect and replace the broken component.
Thus, piping installations are continuously being deteriorated, and various defects occurring in this process may cause various pipe-related accidents every year. However, due to insufficient supplies of manpower and technological methods, it difficult to conduct regular, systematic inspections on the piping installations.
In this regard, robots capable of inspecting the inside of the pipe have been developed, and currently, research thereon has been variously conducted. However, the related art robots needs to be equipped with a driving unit (an actuator) for every wheel to separately adjust the movement state of each wheel according to the shape of the pipe, thereby leading to an increase in the size of the robots.
As a result, attention to robots capable of adjusting the speed of each movement unit according the shape of the pipe using only one driving unit has been increasing.
Further, research into methods allowing a robot capable of inspecting the inside of a pipe to a point thereof required by a user or apparatuses of blocking power from being transferred and collecting the power when the robot abnormally moves has been ongoing.